A lot of it feels like someone who doesn’t like the old code and wants to do it “right.” I can agree that the old code is ugly. But it will take an awful lot of effort to make a new implementation. It’s a lot like what happened to Elvis: A rewrite was going to make it much better, but it took so long, during which Vim added more features, that eventually there are not so many Elvis users. And the rewritten Elvis may have nice code, but users don’t notice that.

Most companies where I worked have a history of rebuilding their applications every 3 to 5 years, some even 2 years. This has extremely high costs, it has a major impact on how successful the application is, and therefore how successful the company is, besides being extremely frustrating for developers to work with a messy code base, and making them want to leave the company. A serious company, with a long-term vision, cannot afford any of it, not the financial loss, not the time loss, not the reputation loss, not the client loss, not the talent loss.

Refactor ruthlessly. Rewrite bravely.

(Nearly all of the code from D3 3.x has been rewritten.)

If I can find some time, maybe I can help pitch in somehow.

That should work, but it's a non-trivial change.

Right now major changes require a deep and broad understanding of the codebase and how things get done.

If we renamed things more often, then it probably wouldn’t be so hard to name them in the first place.

Got a bit sidetracked into refactoring the Element visitor code, so haven't actually started on the event handler stuff per se, but that'll come soon. Element stuff is starting to feel a bit more logical and easier to follow.